Читать книгу Memoirs of a Midget - Walter de la Mare - Страница 13

Beechwood

Chapter Eight

Still the slow train bumped on, loath to drag itself away from the happy harvest fields. Darkness was near when we ourselves alighted at our destination, mounted into a four-wheeled cab, and once more were in motion in the rain-laid dust. On and on rolled Pollie and I and our luggage together, in such ease and concealment after the hard wooden seats and garish light that our journey began to seem—as indeed I wished for the moment it might prove—interminable. One after another the high street lamps approached, flung their radiance into our musty velvet cabin, and went gliding by. Ever and again the luminous square of a window beyond the outspread branches of a tree would float on. Then suddenly our narrow solitude was invaded by the bright continuous flare flung into it from a row of shops.

Never before had I been out after nightfall. I gazed enthralled at the splendours of fruit and cakes, silks and sweetmeats packed high behind the glass fronts. Wasn’t I myself the heiress of £110 a year? Indeed I was drinking in Romance, and never traveller surveyed golden Moscow or the steeps of Tibet with keener relish than I the liquid amber, ruby, and emerald that summoned its customers to a wayside chemist’s shop. Twenty—what a child I was! I smile now at these recollections with an indulgence not unmixed with envy. It is Moscow survives, not the artless traveller.

After climbing a long hill—the wayside houses steadily thinning out as we ascended—the cab came to a standstill. The immense, shapeless old man who had so miraculously found our way for us, and who on this mild August evening was muffled up to his eyes in a thick ulster, climbed down backwards from his box and opened the door. At the same moment, as if by clockwork, opened another door—that of the last house on the hill. I was peering out of the cab, then, at my home; and framed in that lighted oblong stood Mrs Bowater. All utterly different from what I had foreseen: this much smaller house, this much taller landlady, and—dear me, how fondly I had trusted that she would not for the first time set eyes on her lodger being carried into her house. I had in fancy pictured myself bowing a composed and impressive greeting to her from her own hearthrug. But it was not to be.

Pollie lifted me out, settled me on her arm, and my feet did not touch terra firma again until she had ascended the five stone steps and we were within the passage.

“Lor, miss; then here we are,” she sighed breathlessly, then returned to the cabman to pay him his fare. Even dwarfed a little perhaps by my mourning, there I stood, breathed upon by the warm air of the house, in the midst of a prickly doormat, on the edge of the shiny patterned oilcloth that glossed away into the obscurity from under the gaslight in front of me; and there stood my future landlady. For the first time, with head thrown back, I scanned a countenance that was soon to become so familiar and so endeared. Mrs Bowater’s was a stiff and angular figure. She, too, was in black, with a long, springside boot. The bony hands hung down in their peculiar fashion from her elbows. A large cameo brooch adorned the flat chest. A scanty velvet patch of cap failed to conceal the thin hair sleekly parted in the middle over the high narrow temples. The long dark face with its black, set eyes, was almost without expression, except that of a placid severity. She gazed down at me, as I up at her, steadily, silently.

“So this is the young lady,” she mused at last, as if addressing a hidden and distant listener. “I hope you are not over-fatigued by your journey, miss. Please to step in.”

To my ear, Mrs Bowater’s was what I should describe as a low, roaring voice, like falling water out of a black cloven rock in a hill-side; but what a balm was its sound in my ear, and how solacing this dignified address to jaded nerves still smarting a little after my victory on the London, Chatham, and Dover Railway. Making my way around a grandfather’s clock that ticked hollowly beside the door, I followed her into a room on the left of the passage, from either wall of which a pair of enormous antlers threatened each other under the discoloured ceiling. For a moment the glare within and the vista of furniture legs confused my eyes. But Mrs Bowater came to my rescue.

“Food was never mentioned,” she remarked reflectively, “being as I see nothing to be considered except as food so-called. But you will find everything clean and comfortable; and I am sure, miss, what with your sad bereavements and all, as I have heard from Mr Pellew, I hope it will be a home to you. There being nothing else as I suppose that we may expect.”

My mind ran about in a hasty attempt to explore these sentiments. They soothed away many misgivings, though it was clear that Mrs Bowater’s lodger was even less in dimensions than Mrs Bowater had supposed. Clean: after so many months of Mrs Sheppey’s habits, it was this word that sang in my head. Wood, glass, metal flattered the light of gas and coal, and for the first time I heard my own voice float up into my new “apartment”: “It looks very comfortable, thank you, Mrs Bowater; and I am quite sure I shall be happy in my new abode.” There was nothing intentionally affected in this formal little speech.

“Which being so,” replied Mrs Bowater, “there seems to be trouble with the cabman, and the day’s drawing in, perhaps you will take a seat by the fire.”

A stool nicely to my height stood by the steel fender, the flames played in the chimney; and for a moment I was left alone. “Thank God,” said I, and took off my hat, and pushed back my hair.… Alone. Only for a moment, though. Its mistress gone, as fine a black cat as ever I have seen appeared in the doorway and stood, green-eyed, regarding me. To judge from its countenance, this must have been a remarkable experience.

I cried seductively, “Puss.”

But with a blink of one eye and a shake of its forepaw, as if inadvertently it had trodden in water, it turned itself about again and disappeared. In spite of all my cajoleries, Henry and I were never to be friends.

Whatever Pollie’s trouble with the cabman may have been, Mrs Bowater made short work of it. Pollie was shown to the room in which she was to sleep that night. I took off my bodice and bathed face, hands, and arms to the elbow in the shallow bowl Mrs Bowater had provided for me. And soon, wonderfully refreshed and talkative, Pollie and I were seated over the last meal we were to share together for many a long day.

There were snippets of bread and butter for me, a little omelette, two sizes too large, a sugared cherry or two sprinkled with “hundreds and thousands,” and a gay little bumper of milk gilded with the enwreathed letters, “A Present from Dover.” Alack-a-day for that omelette! I must have kept a whole family of bantams steadily engaged for weeks together. But I was often at my wits’ end to dispose of their produce. Fortunately Mrs Bowater kept merry fires burning in the evening—“Ladies of some sizes can’t warm the air as much as most,” as she put it. So at some little risk to myself among the steel fire-irons, the boiled became the roast. At last I made a clean breast of my horror of eggs, and since by that time my landlady and I were the best of friends, no harm came of it. She merely bestowed on me a grim smile of unadulterated amusement, and the bantams patronized some less fastidious stomach.

My landlady was a heavy thinker, and not a copious—though a leisurely—talker. Minutes would pass, while with dish or duster in hand she pondered a speech; then perhaps her long thin lips would only shut a little tighter, or a slow, convulsive rub of her lean forefinger along the side of her nose would indicate the upshot. But I soon learned to interpret these mute signs. She was a woman who disapproved of most things, for excellent, if nebulous, reasons; and her silences were due not to the fact that she had nothing to say, but too much.

Pollie and I talked long and earnestly that first evening at Beechwood. She promised to write to me, to send me all the gossip of the village, and to come and see me when she could. The next morning, after a sorrowful breakfast, we parted. Standing on the table in the parlour window, with eyes a little wilder than usual, I watched her pass out of sight. A last wave of her handkerchief, and the plump-cheeked, fair-skinned face was gone. The strangeness and solitude of my situation flooded over me.

For a few days, strive as she might, Mrs Bowater’s lodger moped. It was not merely that she had become more helpless, but of far less importance. This may, in part, be accounted for by the fact that, having been accustomed at Lyndsey to live at the top of a high house and to look down on the world, when I found myself foot to foot with it, so to speak, on Beechwood Hill, it alarmingly intensified the sense of my small stature. Use and habit however. The relative merits of myself and of the passing scene gradually readjusted themselves with a proper respect for the former. Soon, too, as if from heaven, the packing-case containing my furniture arrived. Mrs Bowater shared a whole morning over its unpacking, ever and again standing in engrossed consideration of some of my minute treasures, and, quite unaware of it, heaving a great sigh. But how to arrange them there in a room already over-occupied?